Surely Gluttony, Avarice, Anger are traits of man’s intemperate passions rather than of woman’s humours. Vitium is neuter, it will serve for either or none. But it is the old story of the sculptor and the lion. He showed the King of the Beasts a group finely carved that represented a man slaying a lion. “Ah,” said the royal beast, “if a lion had been the sculptor, the figures in the group would have been in reversed positions.”
It was men, not women, who wrought these representations of the cardinal vices.
Tramesaïgues (between the waters) occupies a rock, the road passes below it.
The cluster of lakes in the Néouville basin of mountains have been taken in hand as well as the Lac de Caillaouas. The undertaking was difficult, as work was possible there for only three months in the summer; all the rest of the year the basin in which they lie is buried in snow, and some of the tarns remain hard frozen. The largest of the lakes is Orredon, lying 5600 feet above the sea; it is the lowest of all, and receives the waters of the Lac d’Aubert and the Lac Aumar, lying in one valley, separated by a gravelly ridge of glacial rubbish; the Lac de Cap-de-Long reposes in another. The works were begun in 1901 and terminated in 1905.
The Four Valleys—Magonac, Neste, Aure, and La Baronne—formed another of those confederate republics of which there existed so many in the Pyrenees. Of these Magonac, with its chief town Castelnau, lay to the north of Lannemezan, and was not properly a valley at all.
After the extinction of the Armagnacs, the overlordship passed to the kings of France, and each and all from Louis XII to Louis XVI had to recognize and allow their very extended privileges. From the year 1300 no seigneur could withdraw an inhabitant of the Four Valleys from the jurisdiction of their own judges; every citizen could own land, marry, create an industry, or carry on any trade without authorization. The right to bear arms belonged to every one; and up to the eve of the Revolution the Four Valleys were exempt from all war-tax and from the obligation to have troops quartered on them.
La Fayette had no occasion to have gone to America to have seen what republican self-government was. It existed at his doors.